Roadmap

And work goes on!… We continue to relentlessly hammer away at the new features and content mentioned in the previous roadmaps. And yes, you’ll be happy to know that this month is no exception: we will still manage to bring you some ‘new’ things to look forward to.

We know how much you all enjoy these road maps, with anticipation of the things to come, and we are just as anxious to share them with you. Keeping you informed of our broad development goals is part of our whole outlook. For us communication is key to making sure we stay on the mark and never get out ahead of our userbase. So as things begin to take shape and features mature, we do our best to show you the progression and previews as soon as we possibly can. Although these are not ‘deadlines’, they should give a you good idea of the things you need to get excited about.

Performance

The graphics optimizations we mentioned in previous roadmaps are still very much ongoing and current. We are investing a considerable amount of resources to get this done. Graphical improvements and optimizations are key to future proofing the rFactor 2 graphics engine. With that in mind, we are taking our time to methodically test each optimization pass to make sure everything stays put and is in working order, and that is why it’s taking a little longer than originally planned. Thanks to our very focused group of dedicated testers who are looking at each area, we are moving forward at a steady pace. We hope to get it out to you ASAP!

VR

And speaking of specifics, VR is one area where we know we need to improve performance, and these optimizations are showing very promising increases in stability and overall framerate.

Triple Screen – Multiview

“Multiview” has to render three separate viewpoints and because of this, it’s inherently more taxing on any system. You’ll be happy to know we have worked on some very specific optimizations that will positively affect multiview performance

Content

After releasing the KartSim pack earlier this week, we wanted to reassure you that we also have new free content coming up:

March 761

We have a solid commitment to historic racing and we hope you find rFactor 2 a good place to experience some of the great cars of the past. With that we are pleased to announce that we will be releasing the March 761 soon for free. Not just that, we have also updated the Brabham BT44 for some excellent head-to-head racing.

Botniaring

Finnish fans! We have a new track on the horizon. Introducing the Botniaring, located in Southern Ostrobothnia, Jurva, Finland aka Perkeleville (big grin) The track is perfect for our upcoming Tatuus cars as well as many others.

Zandvoort

We have a number of updates to the Zandvoort track that is currently in beta. While we were building the track, it was being repaved and our 0.20 version showed a version of the track as it was then: about three quarters done, with some old asphalt in the final sector. Since then, repaving has been finished and the Audi S curve was remodeled for the DTM races. On top of that we added a lot of detail, for example in the pit area, and at the same time optimized the track. We’re almost ready to put the track through final testing, so we hope to bring you this new version soon!

Oreca 07 LMP2

After all these free updates above, we are also proud to announce another car that will be part of a new upcoming pack – say hi to the super successful Oreca 07 LMP2! Used across all major endurance series the Oreca LMP2 almost won outright at Le Mans last year with Jackie Chan Racing DC.

UI

Most of our focus on the UI in the last months has been to include all of the current base features and test them to make sure they function properly. On the surface this might seem like an easy task, but it involves a lot of repeated clicking and trying: the UI is a complex matrix of interdependences that we need to carefully unravel to better understand and improve. So before really jumping in to conquer the new features, we needed a solid base.

As this first phase begins to wrap up and we have a stable functioning UI, our focus is shifting to those specific things that really need to be more user friendly, existing features that were either hidden or not readily visible enough to find and use. Two current examples of this are custom teams/skins and driver swaps.

Using custom skins in the current UI, although functional, has always been a bit obtuse and not straight forward for the average user. We saw a couple of ways to improve this going forward. One is to offer a simpler way to get your skin in game, and avoid the need to alt-tab or even exit rFactor 2, just to see your skin on the car. We’re still playing with a few ways to make this less fiddly. Next, custom ‘team’ creation needs to be more direct and easier to achieve. This involves thinking like a new user and making smart dialogs and using correct terminology, that way there’s no doubts about how naming or hierarchy.

Driver swaps are another area that works in the current UI, but is complicated to use in practice: having to close rF2 and navigate through somewhat hidden menus is not ideal and prone to user error, and having to assign keys to perform simple actions is a bit overkill. So the new way to do a driver swap is simple. When you join a server, we will ask you if you want to drive a car or join as as a spectator. When you choose the latter and click drive, you’ll get a pop up list of names to choose from, click select and you’re ready to drive once your team mate pits – simple as that!

Competition

The competition structure continues to take shape, and just like the UI we are focusing on the ground work. This means dealing with and squishing any bugs related to the day to day functioning of the competition structure itself. Competitions, as you may know, can span many weeks with multiple events and sessions. It’s therefore important that each code change is throughly tested for reliability and stability. By basing this on the cloud technology of our parent company Luminis we ensure the system will be very scalable, and it is certainly our intention to end up with an open system that can also be used by the many existing leagues out there.

We hope to show you more real soon!

Community

When we did the paint competition a few months ago, we were overwhelmed by the large amount of high quality entries. Encouraged by this, we concluded we wanted to do more of these competitions to showcase the many talented painters in our community. That said, assembling all these skins into packs proved to be a lot of work, so after discussing various options we decided to build some automation to more easily generate new cars, their skins, and all data and preview images associated with them. That is the reason the GT3 skins took us longer, but we’re confident we can release them next week. To give you a preview of all the nice skins you will see, we included a “spotter guide” like overview for you to enjoy!

Another month has flown by! The February 2018 roadmap is here! And as usual we haven’t just been twiddling our button boxes, we’ve been furiously making improvements and creating new and exciting content and features, some of which we are happy to share with you now. This short month has been a whirlwind of activity, which included competition infrastructure, getting in some new features for the new UI, testing performance optimizations, and building new content, both track and car.

Performance

We mentioned last month already that performance was being worked on, it’s still one of our main priorities, we’re continuing to chip away at it and have come even further, it should not be long now until we can release these improvements to you. It’s safe to say you’ll will be very surprised at the end results. In our internal testing we’ve seen a substantial performance boost and higher frame-rates across the board. As with anything though we are cautious, it’s in the hands of our internal test team to make sure it’s all working as expected.

Content

The content team has been keeping very busy, as usual, which is not hard as we have a lot of new content in the planning.

Corvette C7.R GTE/GTLM

Recently, on social, we teased this car with a short movie with a roaring V8, and the license for it has been announced over a year ago, but now you can finally see the car during internal testing at Silverstone. Scheduled for a late April release, this car will not come alone and will be part of a new upcoming pack.

Norma M30 LMP3

We’re super chuffed to see an LMP3 enter the grid! The Norma M30 is a fairly recent car that has already built up an impressive record in the races it has competed in, such as in the ELMS race last year at Spa, where we took this picture of it. We’re sure this new class will become quite popular in rFactor 2!

Sebring International Raceway

Last but not least, we can now proudly announce that we have licensed America’s oldest road racing track, host to many historic endurance races. Sebring International Raceway is being built based on a laser scan we did last month. This is a first for us and although we have made many tracks based on CAD data and other information that have been quite accurate, this scan will allow us to get every little detail right. It will take us a couple of months to finish this one, but we are working on it feverishly!

HUD

The official Studio 397 HUD is still being polished and refined, we know you are impatient to get your hands on it, while working on it we’ve come across a few bugs that lay dormant deep in the code that we needed to address, this is a win-win for the HUD in general and we decided it needs attention. It will certainly be part of the next build.

UI

Our UI is making leaps and bounds, we’ve got most of the basic features in and some new slick features. For starters we’ve looked at making triple screen setup much more intuitive, with a full set of controls via the UI settings screen. This will be an additional functionality to go along with the on track pop up widget.

Next we overhauled the live replay screen, controls are now not only selectable via controls as before but also via mouse clicks.

Also we’ve added in a modern drop down standing ticker, for easy access to driver times from the live replay. This incidentally also shows our capabilities to overlay HTML with live camera feeds, a technique we will leverage in other places such as broadcast overlays.

Competition

In the realm of competition we have our full time team actively hacking away at a very inclusive and encompassing competition structure, which is a big task not done overnight! We have big plans and that’s why we want to do this from the ground up the right way. Our next big task has been the implementation of full race series, including sign ups, practice, qualification and multiple race heats over a set period of time. These new features are ongoing and need a lot of testing so we are looking at a little while more to get this up and running, but it’s not that far off, we can see the horizon!

KartSim

We already announced that a consumer release of KartSim is coming soon. Currently this version is undergoing final testing and polishing to include our visual damage model and the latest rain effects. Just to show you how good it looks, a few more shots to keep you entertained until its release.

Community

In our ongoing effort to encourage more of that community vibe, we will be adding a new forum area to showcase your original paint artwork, screenshots, and videos. Additionally, we will also be adding all templates for existing cars to the base install, that way everyone has access to the latest updated templates. Our plan is to streamline the templates and their extra parts so there’s less guesswork and more creative time!

Welcome to the January 2018 roadmap. We’re really excited about what this year will bring. Our internal roadmap has been setup and it features lots of cool content, updates and technical improvements. So let’s get started!

Welcome to rFactor 2 trailer

First of all, we have a brand new trailer for rFactor 2. We hope you like it!

Performance

We’ve had a lot of feedback from some of our users about the graphics performance of the simulation. Over the last months we have improved the fidelity of the DX11 graphics a lot, but partially due to the fact that we still had to support the DX9 engine for every update, we did not yet take full advantage of some of the things DX11 could do. When investigating some of the reports we got, we decided it was time to start making some fundamental improvements to the engine. We are still working on that, but internal builds are looking promising, so we hope to have more news about that soon.

Content

With the release of our GT3 Power Pack and our Formula E Energize Pack last year we are looking forward to bringing you great car and track content this year. With that we are pleased to announce that we have signed a license with Portland International Raceway which will be released for free later this year and ahead of the labor day race. The track has an incredible history having been developed out of the remnants of the City of Vanport. At 1.97 miles, the track has hosted several senior racing events most notably Champ Car and Indycar with the lap record by the late Justin Wilson of 57.597.

We are also working at completing the promised update to the Zandvoort track, adding the latest resurfacing changes as well as a change to one of the turns that was done before the last DTM race. Our expectation is to have that done somewhere towards the end of the first quarter and we will keep you informed about its progress.

HUD

Our updated HUD is currently in final testing and will be added in the next code update we are going to release. Last month we already talked a bit about some of the new data we’ve made available, and this is probably a good time to talk a bit about the new HUD design. As we already said it is still based on our existing technology, but we’ve redesigned it from scratch to look more modern. This means we designed it for the screen resolution that is currently used, and updated the font to conform to our new styling. We have tried to go for a HUD that features all the data, but with the least possible duplication. The most important things remain on screen all the time, some lesser needed data is available in the different pages of the multi-function display (MFD). On top of that we have tried to ensure that the data we display is accurate enough for people to use when driving. Some hightlights include the new “deltabest” bar and digital display at the top, as well as the fuel left and fuel used on the last lap indications at the bottom of the screen. The screenshot is still a work in progress, so some details might still change, but this will give you an impression on what we’re testing now.

KartSim

In a couple of weeks from now, KartSim will release a consumer version of their content on Steam. All of it will run inside rFactor 2 and can be mixed and matched with our other content. The majority of that content will be paid, however they are also looking at doing a free indoor track. KartSim will include the x30 kart models and three laser (Lidar) scanned kart tracks: Paul Fletcher International Circuit, Buckmore Park International Circuit and Glan Y Gors Championship Circuit. This pack will be around 20 euros. There will also be a version geared to the professional karting market (KartSim Pro) which includes more tracks and karts and includes and entry into the British eSports Karting Championship. It will cost 395 UK Pounds plus VAT and will only be available via KartSim.

Third Party Support

As we have spoken about in the past, we are ready to support third parties that wish to publish items via our store with the official licenses and agreements in place. Please do contact us via Discord or start a conversation with us on the forum for more information.

Laser Scanning

Finally, we are proud to announce that a few days ago we have successfully scanned our first track with professional LIDAR equipment. We’ll keep you guys in suspense a little bit longer about which track this will be, but needless to say we are very excited to work with such data to produce a very accurate rendition of this track.

Over the past few months we have been working heavily on improving the graphics engine in many ways, so let’s look at a few updates:

Lighting:

Our lighting has been transformed, reflecting the environment, this is called IBLA – Image Based Lighting and it substantially improves the overall lighting in our graphics engine, creating a richer, more realistic view. This technology will help us improve and develop the engine and bring in new elements.

DX11 is now Go!

We are now bringing our DX11 as the default build people will see for the first time. With that we will be no longer supporting DX9, in fact, this is our last official supported version of DX9 – already you will not receive some of the visual benefits, such as the windscreen effects and moving wipers. Removing DX9 will allow us to concentrate on one build and enhance it – it also means new users see rFactor 2 in the correct light!

We do recognise that many draw to screen plugins are affected, however, our intent it to bring in tools to allow new ways to show data on screen without impacting stability or performance. Shortly we will have an update for the HUD which will provide access to additional data.

Cache folder:

Ever since we migrated rFactor 2 to Steam, we’ve been getting a lot of user feedback about the implementation of our “cache” folder and how it holds a lot of components that not everybody wants installed. Because it came with the base install, there was no good way to delete that folder as Steam would simply download those files again if you did. We’ve now removed that folder completely. On first launch we will still subscribe you to all Studio 397 content, but you will be able to unsubscribe from any item you don’t need.

Rain:

Our rain is still work in progress in many areas, however we are pleased to to bring a significant change, creating more atmosphere in and out of the car. We have converted much of our content to incorporate rain, however there is still work to which will go into early 2018.

Cars:

Our cars now simulate rain effects, including wiper animations and spray. There are different levels of detail which affect the windscreen which the ‘Rain Drops’ option in the display menu will control. These effects include water on the windshield as well as the car body with ripples dependant on your speed.

Tracks:

Tracks now have additional reflections, with the real road being redone. Kerbs also reflect correct in wet conditions and now on some tracks we will start to see dynamic puddle buildup, based off research and CAD. Currently these effects do not affect physics, however we intend to build that in as well.

3rd Party Content

We have mentioned this a few times before and now are starting to build the framework to allow creators to potentially license products. Our ambition is to help legitimise creators within our community and promote their incredible work. Our first venture will be with Kartsim, who have created a super realistic Karting platform and laser-scanned kart tracks – stay tuned for more info.

Final note

As we said before, thank you so much for your continued support! We are super-excited about 2018, with lots of new features and content coming – not only that with the world looking at sim racing as a bona fide esport we are in a great position to bring you not only great competition infrastructure, but the events to go with it!

Last month we reflected on 2017 and hinted at new content. Earlier this week we announced the Formula E Energize Pack, bringing electric racing to rFactor 2. This weekend you can all watch the season opening double header race in Hong Kong. We announced a hotlap competition, which gives you a chance to win some exclusive Formula E goodies, or show your friends how much better you are than them!

Some of you might have watched the talk and drive that Marcel did on RaceDepartment. For those of you that didn’t, you missed out on some free copies of the Formula E pack. We’ll summarize some of the new things that were discussed there.

Obviously a lot of questions centered around the Formula E content. We’ll release an update of that in a week or two that will include the new team liveries that we were not able to show you ahead of the opening race, and we’ll also provide a code update that will give you a better insight into the amount of battery you have left, and are using per lap. Since this part of the strategy is such an integral part of racing these cars, we feel an improvement is in order so you don’t have to rely on third party plugins. Incidentally, talking about third party plugins, Crew Chief already released a code update that supports Formula E. If you have not checked it out yet, we can definitely recommend you do so!

We’re also ready to announce that we will be making DX11 the default before Christmas. As an intermediate step before we come with a new HUD system for plugins, we’ll focus on providing a default HUD that includes a lot of the features you have been enjoying in third party plugins. One of these is a new dial that show you the time delta compared to your best lap, but we have a few other new things and enhancements planned. Part of this DX11 update will be the inclusion of the “rain update” that we previewed at SimExpo. We’ve since perfected it. We’ve also improved the ambient lighting, producing subtle differences that give the overall image a slightly more dramatic look. At the moment we are working feverishly to update all our cars and tracks to make maximum use of these new features. We’ll incrementally release those updates, but anticipate to already have a substantial part done before the end of this year. The shots below are still work in progress, but show you what we’ve been doing to make the rain look better on both cars and tracks.

Another announcement is that we officially support all the new Windows Mixed Reality headsets, check it here. In 2018 we will focus on more DX11 related updates, both in terms of performance and fidelity. As announced, that means we’re deprecating DX9, meaning it will still be available, but it won’t be updated anymore. This gives us more bandwidth to focus on the new engine, which should be a huge benefit for everybody.

Wrapping up this month’s update, we all wish you a happy holiday season and we’ll be back with one final roadmap update close to the end of the year. Of course we will be back in 2018. Happy simracing!

We’re nearing the end of the year, which is a good time to start looking ahead at what the new year will bring, but also to look back and reflect on the current year. At the start of 2017 we were still building our team and roadmap, and I think it is fair to say that we did not anticipate all the interesting conversations, partnerships and opportunities that presented themselves in the months that followed. Even though, we knew when we started that there were a few key areas in rFactor 2 we had to address.

The graphics engine needed to be upgraded to DX11 for two reasons. First of all, it enabled us to implement VR. On top of that, from an artistic and technical point of view, it allowed us to start evolving our graphics engine. Of course, we started with a “make or buy” decision as there are obviously existing graphics (or rather game) engines around we could have chosen. Nevertheless, remaining backward compatible was an important goal with our existing content, and we felt that this would have been difficult with a completely new engine. So instead, we chose to build a new DX11 engine, taking the current engine as a starting point. We are now confident that the new engine is more capable and ready for the future. By addressing some of the weak points of the DX9 engine we are building something that is starting to look really beautiful.

We also wanted to replace the existing UI with something that was more maintainable, flexible and future-proof. Throughout the year, we’ve already previewed quite a few screenshots and artist’s impressions, and by now I’m sure everybody is wondering when we will release the first version. The client part of the UI is in private beta testing now, and we are receiving lots of feedback about all aspects of it. During the World’s Fastest Gamer we’ve also previewed parts of the competition infrastructure, at that point still as a separate user interface in a browser, but eventually these parts will also end up in game. We are still working on some other parts, such as the Launcher, the dedicated server and a new HUD and overlay system that is scheduled to replace plugins that were drawing directly to the screen in DX9. It is fair to say that all of these tasks are taking more time than we expected, so bear with us for a little while longer!

The third thing we wanted to do is build high-quality and high-profile content that was properly licensed. A lot of people were also telling us they preferred series over individual cars. So we set out to license five GT3 cars. Finishing them this month was very satisfying and kept us incredibly busy at Studio 397. The GT3 Power Pack includes the previously released McLaren 650S GT3, previously announced Bentley Continental GT3, along with the teased Callaway Corvette C7 GT3-R and surprise Mercedes AMG GT3 and Radical RXC Turbo GT3 cars. As our first pack and DLC this has been a great learning experience, and we’re very grateful to our team, our testers, and you, our customers, for dealing with the pressures and effects that came along with it. We’re very pleased with the results, and hope you’ll enjoy these fantastic vehicles. And one more thing, we are in the final phase of testing an update that addresses the low framerates that some of you have been experiencing with higher quality shadow settings, and we hope to have that released before the end of this week.

We are already hard at work to come up with the next pieces of content, including a brand new track that is scheduled to be released before Christmas. On top of that, we are also opening up our content store to third parties, further increasing the amount of high quality content and offering our modding community the opportunity to take the next step to convert their passion into something they can make a living out of. If you’re a modder and you’re interested, feel free to get in touch!

DX11

As we said in a previous update, we feel our DX11 version is stable by now, so it is our intention to make it the default at our next major code update. That update will include some of the rain and lighting improvements we have previewed at SimExpo, which you can also definitely expect before the end of this year. There are three reasons for the delay here. First of all, we were getting some feedback at the SimExpo that we wanted to improve on. Secondly, some of these changes will also require us to do content updates, and finally, we are working on an improved HUD that contains some of the information that drivers were missing and were installing third party plugins for. As explained above, a completely new HUD system is something we are still working on, and you can expect that sometime next year.

Physics

As you already know, our core physics and, more specifically, tyre development is always ongoing. We are continually looking for ways to improve and push things further to get you to that next level of realism! Our own physics developer and tyre guru Michael Borda took some time out to fill you in on the latest in tyre tech, notably, developments that translate into improving tyre feel and overall handling.

“Since the inception of rFactor 2, we’ve calculated centrifugal forces in a ‘quasi-static model’, thinking this simplification was correct or close enough to reality to not require deeper adjustment. It was considered fact, when in reality, accelerations should be calculated localized as the distribution in the contact patch can vary significantly to the original behavior. Some correlation issues crept up over time, and as we’ve collected more data, it became apparent that it wasn’t on the data side. You may think that this might be sloppy, however, the reality is the way data is measured, interpreted (smoothed / adjusted / fitted), scaled, or worst of all, even copied between tyres, makes trusting data a very difficult thing to do. In this case we had strong suspicions that the data was measured under a single condition, simply offset and then applied to different data points. This doubt left plenty of room for us to believe that our model was probably correct, when considering the obvious short-cuts the manufacturer had taken in measuring the data. So everything was rosy, we thought, and then we finally obtained the same type of data from another tyre manufacturer. This time, they went to the extra step of measuring at multiple loads. Once we had this corroborating information, it became obvious there was a glaring issue with our tyre model. Of course, this was an original part of the tyre model that hadn’t been touched for years, taken for granted. This was also a essentially a non-issue before the introduction of the contact patch model. After a little thinking and investigating, it became obvious that our ‘harmless’ simplification, wasn’t so harmless after-all.

To describe the effect in practical terms, after some early testing, it is quite obvious that the ‘speed sensitivity’ of tyres is decreased. A reduction of speed sensitivity, meaning that the tyres lose less grip as a direct consequence of rotational speed. The resulting contact patch is a little bigger (longer), especially when compared to the previous tyres under a combination of both high speed and load. As you apply slip angle, the longer contact patch increases the sliding speed towards the trailing edge of the contact patch, making tyres more prone to overheat at high speed. A larger patch also increases cooling (as contact conductance is the primary driver of heat dissipation in a tyre). In general, tyre temperatures will probably be slightly higher, so you may need to increase conduction slightly to achieve realistic temperatures. In terms of overall feeling, this is the biggest change in rF2 since the introduction of the contact patch model. This also marks the first major change to the QSA model itself.

So now, with the latest newly-released build, we now calculate localized accelerations, and our QSA model, becomes a little bit less “quasi-static” than before.”

More details on this will be published soon as part of an upcoming physics blog, where Micheal will go more in depth on how to leverage these improvements.

Miscellaneous

Some other things we talked about in earlier roadmaps that deserve an update:

The Corvette C7.R GTE car is mostly done from a model point of view. We’re working on sound and physics and are looking at other options in GTE and related classes.

Our Motec implementation still has not started, mostly because we’ve prioritized other things at the moment.

Progress on Zandvoort and our first Radical have been slow, and we expect both to be completed in 2018.

We are already working on some of the Tatuus cars we’ve licensed, but those are still in early phases.

A final thing we reported on is improved spotter code. To be honest, there the community has come up with a great alternative, Crew Chief, so we’re reconsidering what we should be focusing on here.

Wrapping up this month’s roadmap I would like to thank everybody for their continuous feedback. A year ago we wrote our first roadmap with our main goal to give everybody more insight into our development. It is fair to say that some things went to plan, others maybe did not, but we still hope this openness is appreciated in the end. Happy simracing!

We’re back! After a busy weekend at SimracingExpo held at the famed Nurburgring, most of us have both finished vacations and returned to the office, ready to make progress on our next update.

The Expo was a lot of fun, and we got to meet and greet plenty of hardware manufacturers, software studios, and of course a lot of simracers. Thank you to everyone who came to see us. Studio 397 attended with two cockpits: one triple screen and one virtual reality. Both were running an internal build with the newly announced Bentley Continental GT3 2017 racing in the rain at NOLA Motorsports Park.

McLaren’s World’s Fastest Gamer

Thank you to everyone who participated in the WFG using rFactor 2! It was a stunning success and something we’re really proud of. Not only did we take on a fairly short-notice build of the McLaren 650s GT3 for use in the competition, but we built, tested, and implemented a whole user registration and online session monitoring system that performed wonderfully. This makes us really excited about the future and how a working online competition structure such as that will really get people racing online in rFactor 2.

Bentley Continental GT3 2017

We are very excited to announce the Bentley Continental GT3 2017 as the second car in our upcoming GT3 pack. Used in many of the premier GT3 categories around the world, the car has a 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 and up to unrestricted 600hp. The GT3 pack is due for release in October.

Interview with Marcel Offermans (Head of Studio 397) at SimracingExpo

Marcel took the time to give some information on upcoming features showcased at the event, including rain effects like working raindrops that move when the car does, working wipers, raindrops on the body of the car, lighting changes, and dynamic puddles that grow or shrink. The rain effects should come out around the same time as the GT3 pack, possibly shortly afterwards.

Also mentioned in the FaceBook livestream was updated damage and a licensing agreement with Tatuus Racing s.r.l. for a number of open-wheel Formula cars. This allows us to fill out the ladder of progression from Karts to Grand Prix racing and will work well within our competition structure due out next year.

And to whet your appetite, here’s a sneak peek of the next car in our upcoming pack!

It’s summertime, and we are all but on holiday at Studio 397. We’ve passed the half-way mark in August, so it’s time for another roadmap update.

UI

In the last couple of months we have shown you various bits of the new UI. We are now at a point where we have basically incorporated all features of the existing user interface into the new one, with a few extensions. In the upcoming weeks, we will be testing the first beta of this user interface with our testing team. During that phase we not only intend to focus on bugfixing, but also usability testing, so depending on how our testers respond, we might make further changes to parts of the interface. Obviously we can’t predict yet how long this phase will take, but it should tell you that we’re pretty close to a first public beta release.

A near final version of the in-game session settings.

Competition

The first two rounds of qualification have been completed by now, with the live broadcast of the Zandvoort race coming up on Sunday, so this is a good time to look back at what were basically two very exciting weeks. Last week’s broadcast has seen a combined number of views of well over 600.000 on Facebook and YouTube and the 20 drivers in that race showed some very fast and clean racing. The top 5 finishers ensured themselves a place in the final, so congratulations to them! Many others put in a tremendous amount of time and effort, arguably in the toughest time trial ever seen in simracing. For example, at Silverstone, Miguel Ballester drove 1469 laps to earn his place in the top 20. Our second round at Zandvoort showed that the top 10 in terms of number of laps on average clocked well over 1000 laps. In the first two rounds combined, approximately 260.000 laps were driven. We wish everybody competing in this competition the best of luck!

Number of concurrent drivers on the competition servers for the first and second round.

We’ve also had quite a few questions about the brand new competition system that is hosting all these sessions. It is actually a perfect example of how we were able to leverage some of the existing technologies that have been developed within Luminis. For everything we do, our development workflow starts with setting up a fully automated system to build and deploy code. This allows us to quickly code, test and set live updates. In this case, any code update we push can be deployed to a staging environment for testing within minutes, and with a flick of a switch we can also update our production systems. In fact, our production systems use a method called “blue green deployments” to end up with zero downtime: we deploy each update to new servers, switch traffic from the old to the new ones, and then stop the old servers. Our production environment also has built-in redundancy where we run at least two servers at all times. We actively monitor those servers and if any of them goes down, it immediately gets replaced with a new one. This all happens in the cloud and the system that manages this is called Cloud RTI (run-time infrastructure).

This is the custom monitoring dashboard we use to have a real-time view on competition statistics.

For horizontal scalability reasons, all our server side code is stateless, but of course we want to keep track of a lot of data and statistics. All of this is handled by another product we could leverage, the Information Grid, which is a layer on top of all kinds of data stores that manages the schema of the data and all changes to that schema over time. It allows us to work with data at a much higher level and adds extensive semantics to that data that ensure it stays manageable and usable over a long period of time. Information Grid builds on lots of cloud based data stores and adds security and advanced search capabilities. All of this infrastructure ensures that we can keep our focus on building the features of the competition system, without having to worry about a lot of infrastructural concerns.

Information Grid dashboard showing some global statistics about the data stores in use.

For the actual code, we leverage another open source project we’ve co-founded with a few other companies: Amdatu. Amdatu is a stack of modular components to build cloud applications. It provides building blocks for web based, modular user interfaces and it is in fact this toolkit that also is the basis of our new in-game UI. As soon as that is ready, you will see the competition and in-game UI merge into one seamless UI that can be accessed both in-game and outside of it. That way you can always keep up with what’s happening in the world of rFactor 2!

Content

As you know, for the competition we released an early version of Zandvoort, dubbed 0.20, indicating it is not finished yet. Although the track already is very drivable and enjoyable, we intend to further improve it over the next couple of months. Also, we’ve learned that for the DTM race this weekend, they repaved the final section of the track, and made some curb changes to the “Audi S” curve, so we’ll probably take a closer look at those for the final version.

In the mean time we have news to share on the licensing front. A lot is going on there, also in terms of tracks, but as a general rule we do not talk about licenses until the deal is sealed. We are proud to be able to announce that we signed a multi-car deal with the Italian race car manufacturer Tatuus. This will bring several of their current racing cars to rFactor 2, which should be very exciting for all the fans of open wheelers!

DX11

In May we announced the “open beta” of our brand new DX11 engine and in the following months we have received a lot of feedback and support from the community that have lead to numerous improvements to the performance and visual fidelity. Our plan is to make DX11 our new default at the end of September. At that point we will also update our current demo version. We will keep the DX9 builds in sync until the end of the calendar year. We will continue to improve the fidelity of our DX11 engine, improving every aspect of it step by step, and this process will continue in the years to come. As we discussed last month already, we also fully intend to provide an exciting new solution for plugins to render to the screen as part of this ongoing development and we will look at what information we should really be providing “out of the box”.

That’s all for this month, we hope you enjoyed the update, and enjoy the summer!

As we’re counting down to the start of the McLaren World’s Fastest Gamer rFactor 2 competition, it is time for another roadmap update! We have so much underway at the moment in many areas, however, we are not quite ready to show it all.

Competition

As we previously announced, McLaren’s World’s Fastest Gamer starts soon, and we are really excited that rFactor 2 was chosen as the flagship qualifying platform. This competition aligns with the overall competition structure that we are currently building, allowing tournament style events that extend all the way to a license progression system. Our competition platform will be unique in many ways: we will have our own structured competition and, in addition, support the community. We actively believe in the strength of our community to run outstanding events, both online and onsite. Specifically, APIs will be made available to allow sanctioned leagues/competitions to integrate with our overall structure, providing visibility and consistency. We are also developing our license structure based on an overall percentage rating and a system that penalizes drivers for off-track or bad driving by giving time penalties instead of relying on an independent safety rating.

Content

We have some even more exciting news: it’s no secret that we are releasing a McLaren GT car. And now, we are pleased to announce that it will be….drum roll please… the awesome McLaren 650s GT3!

This McLaren will be used in the World’s Fastest Gamer competition and will be available for you all as a paid item in our upcoming item store at the start of August. We’re really excited to launch with this car, which was developed in close cooperation with McLaren. But that’s not all! This car will also be part of a soon-to-be-released wider pack, reaffirming our ambition to align our content! What a tease!

Many of you saw our rendition of Zandvoort at the Max Verstappen days. Since then, we have optimised and further enhanced the track. Like the McLaren above, Zandvoort will be used in the World’s Fastest Gamer competition and will be released as a free addition. Check out some screens below!

Additionally, we are working on some new significant track projects and will share more in the next couple of months.

DX11

Ever since the beginning of the year, we’ve showed you the evolution of our DX11 graphics engine. Right now, we’re close to the point where we are happy enough with the visuals and performance of this engine to soon switch it to become the default. We will keep the DX9 engine around as an option for a little while longer, at least until we’ve rolled out the new overlays (see below). This also does not mean we are done developing the engine. We still have many bigger and smaller improvements to make it look better, and we will keep pushing those out in the upcoming months. At this point, we would also like to thank everybody who actively participated in our open beta. Your input was very helpful and allowed us to improve the whole engine, and VR mode, a lot quicker and better.

UI

Not only are we putting the final touches on our in-game user interface, as you have read above, we are also about to roll out the first parts of the new competition infrastructure, which will fit right in with the new UI. To show you some of the last details we are currently working on, we’ve captured two details of the UI, starting with the calibration screen for your wheel and pedals. As you know, you could always calibrate axes visually, but when specifying the ranges of motion and the deadzones, you had to physically move your wheel or pedal in the right position to set such a limit. Now we’ve included not only the exact numbers, but you can also directly edit them to fine tune them exactly the way you want without having to mess around with text files.

A second detail we’d like to show is what we’ve done with the garage setup screens. There was already a way to compare, and we made that a bit smarter, but we also added a quick way for you to see what changes you made to the current setup compared with the one you saved last. In the shot, you see two gear ratios that have an orange font. Those are ratios you’ve changed. That way you can quickly get an overview. It’s little things like this we are still tweaking. We know it’s taking a bit longer than you, and we, anticipated, but the wait is almost over!

Physics

One of the things we have been working on over the last few months is our tyre model. You may have noticed some changes in the latest version of the Radical, and you will also see them in the upcoming McLaren. These updates reflect our work on improving accurate tyre fidelity. We have a number of tyre updates underway, making one of the best tyre models in consumer racing simulation even better.

Overlays

We have been working hard to create a solution for overlays. As you know, we aren’t great fans of rendering over rFactor 2 screens as this can cause issues that become hard for us to resolve. We have built a solution using HTML. Shortly, we will be allowing 3rd parties to develop their own overlays, not just for broadcast, but for in-game HUDS through an API.

Misc

For those of you who don’t know, this year’s Sim Expo will be held on the 16/17th September at Nurburgring – another great chance for all of sim racing to come together. We will be there, of course, showcasing some cool future features and content, so make sure you pop by!

Welcome back to another monthly update. I’m sure many of you have watched the 24 hours of Le Mans over the weekend. What an exciting race that was, and good news for us as, although they did set a new fastest lap time in qualification, they did not break the record for the most number of laps driven in the race, so we can continue as Studio 397 for another year! We are heavy in development currently in all areas and look forward to bringing you several updates over the next few months and beyond.

Starting on August 1st we will open registration for the rFactor 2 round of the World’s Fastest Gamer competition by McLaren. The winner of that competition will be offered one of the best jobs in esports: that of an official simulator driver in the Formula 1 team. In four rounds people will battle to set the fastest time on different configurations of Silverstone and Zandvoort and compete head to head in weekly races for championship points. These races will all be done in a soon-to-be-announced McLaren GT car.

UI

We have been getting a lot of questions on our new UI lately, which is taking us a bit longer than we anticipated. We’ve already shown you various new screenshots, so we thought this month might be a good time to explain a little bit more about its technical background. For some of you all these terms might be a bit too technical. They are all modern web technologies that allow us to create an interface that is flexible and accessible from all kinds of locations.

A few months ago we already explained the UI is built with HTML. We have chosen to embed a modern browser to render it, and the actual connection with the local game is done via a REST based interface. This interface allows you to control all aspects of the game, and because this technology will both be added to the client and dedicated server, it means we have vastly extended the ways in which you can write all kinds of tools on top of that.

Just as an example, this enables you to create live timing pages that can be used as an overlay for broadcasting. You might have seen this a couple of weeks ago when VEC broadcast their 24h race in DX11. There are many other possible applications though, such as remotely connecting to the garage of a team mate and making improvements to his setup while he is still driving.

Content

We have converted most of our content to DX11 by now, but there are still a few items left. Alongside this roadmap update, we will release two updated pieces of content tomorrow. The São Paulo track, which has seen various texture updates and the Formula 2, which had both texture and physics updates, details of which can be found in the changelog below.

In terms of new content, we mentioned the McLaren GT car earlier and cannot wait to show you more updates on it, content which is aligned is important to us, and over the next couple of months we hope you will be pleasantly surprised! Additionally, we are working hard on bringing Zandvoort to you in all its glory and of course are close to releasing a fantastic car for racing the Radical SR3.

Included with the car is a template, which can be found in the “Templates” folder of your rFactor 2 install. You can use any paint program that can load PSD (Photoshop) files. We advise you to first make a copy of the file before you start painting. When you have created your paint, save it as a DDS file. The folder you should use for that can be seen in the showroom if you’ve loaded the car there. You might need to hit “CREATE DIR” to create the folder the first time, and if you’ve updated the paint while the game was still loaded, hit “RELOAD” to refresh the folder. If you have any questions about this, feel free to ask in our forum or on Discord!

For the record, you cannot yet drive the car, you can only look at it in the showroom (click on “TUNING” on the car screen). Talking about which, we spared no expense and built you a brand new showroom. We hope you like it!

Guidelines

No alcohol, tobacco or illegal products

Any paint job you make is yours and not taken from someone else

You will need to transfer rights to us for the paint to use in the game

You guarantee it does not infringe on any copyrights of third parties, so no logos that you do not have permission to use

How to enter

Please read the guidelines above, then email us on radicalpaints@studio-397.com with 3 images from the showroom, a download link to your PSD and the driver and team name you want to use for your car. The deadline for submission is midnight GMT 27th June 2017!

Miscellaneous

We know with DX11 that many of you cannot use plugins that render to the screen, and we are currently reviewing the best way to add this capability in a future-proof and rock solid way. Our current method of giving plugins access to the screen can cause issues with the stability of our platform as a whole.

As a final note we are proud to announce that we’ve signed a license agreement with MoTec and will add official support for their tools to our simulation. More details about this will be released in the upcoming months. In the mean time, enjoy the summer!

Changelog

Build (DX11)

Fixed: VR trackside cameras.

Fixed: VR Showroom is now rendering properly.

Fixed VR Monitor and replay working in-game.

Fixed: Multi-monitor selection now available.

Fixed: Minor issues with UI font.

Fixed: AI way-points now show in Dev Mode.

Fixed: Zoom and out of focus elements in track-side cameras when in multi-view mode. (Triple screen)